Rising stars Stella Chen, Matthew Lipman eager to bow with the CSO

What could be more exciting for rising stars violinist Stella Chen and violist Matthew Lipman than performing again in front of a live audience after more than a year of a pandemic-forced hiatus? How about making their Ravinia Pavilion stage debuts together, performing for the first time with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?

“It’s overwhelming,” Chen said in a video call alongside Lipman. “I always get nervous just before any performance, but these days, the few performances I’ve been able to do, I feel so grateful. I forget the nerves. You need an audience. It’s a dream.”

It is meaningful for Chen and Lipman, both 28, to be making their joint CSO debut Aug. 8 at Ravinia, under conductor Yue Bao. Both attended the Ravinia Steans Music Institute, Lipman in 2012 and 2013, and Chen in 2013 and 2014. But they met at the age of 15 at the Perlman (as in Itzhak) Music Program’s Summer Music School. “We’ve been playing together for 13 years,” Lipman said. “The first day, we sat next to each other on the bus. We have become not only close friends, but collaborators.”

Each took different paths to RSMI. Chen grew up in Palo Alto, Calif. Neither of her parents, she said, is “musical whatsoever.” But her mother, who had wanted to learn a musical instrument when she was growing up, but didn’t have the financial means, “did everything she could to make sure I had the chance,” Chen said.

Chen began on the piano when she was 5. “It was one of the 500 things she started me on,” she said with a laugh. “Soccer, basketball, figure skating, chess; you name it, I tried it.”

But it was love at first sound when she saw a girl play the violin. At 7, she made the switch. Fortuitously, her mother recruited Li Lin to teach the young Chen. Lin would eventually teach at Juilliard, “because his students did so well,” Chen said. “He was my first violin teacher, and I never had anyone else until I was 18.”

Chen herself never listened to any popular music on the radio, nor did she watch musicians on television. Her parents did not have a record collection. Once she began studying under Lin, her mother took her to see local orchestras and then recitals by such artists as Pinchas Zukerman, Itzhak Perlman and Sarah Chang. Among her own first album purchases were recordings of Bach and Paganini by “Mr. P.” That’s what Chen and Lipman both affectionately call Perlman.

Lipman, a native Chicagoan, grew up listening to classical music. His mother, a visual artist, played it while she painted. As a child, there was an early interest in the trumpet, but he didn’t pursue playing an instrument until the fourth grade when his school offered a string orchestra. His plan was to play any instrument just to get a head start before the trumpet was offered the next year. Because he had no preference, the music director gave him a viola because no one else wanted to play it. As it turned out, Lipman never made the switch.

RSMI looms large in their artistic maturation. Lipman ranks it alongside the Marlboro Music Festival as among the country’s highest-level chamber music festivals. “It is the only high-level chamber music institute that also offers private lessons and solo work,” he said. “That’s probably why it is so intense, but also so incredibly valuable.”

Chen describes her RSMI experience in similar terms, as “extremely intense,” but in a good way. “At the time I was freaking out but I learned so much,” she said. “I got to play with incredible people. I had lessons with Midori. I treasure those summers.”

Chen and Lipman come to Ravinia with impressive honors. In 2019, Chen became the first American since 1955 to win the Queen Elisabeth Competition. In 2020, she was the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and the Lincoln Center Emerging Artist Award. She was the first recipient of the Robert Levin Award from Harvard University, where she was a graduate of the Harvard/New England Conservatory Dual Degree Program. Lipman is a recipient of the first Kovner Fellowship at the Juilliard School and was the first-prize winner of the Washington, Stulberg and Johansen International String Competitions. He was the only violist featured on WFMT-FM Chicago’s “30 Under 30” list of the top international classical musicians.

For Chen, performing with the CSO is a dream that was deferred. “I was supposed to play a Beethoven Romance with the CSO last December, so I was absolutely crushed,” she said. The prospect of appearing with the orchestra at Ravinia is “pretty freaking awesome,” she said.

“It means a lot,” Lipman added. “When I was a kid, the first time I heard the CSO, Pinchas Zukerman came to play. It was the first time I went to hear a viola soloist. It was in June, and that night there was a tornado warning in the southern suburbs. My parents said we couldn’t drive to the city, and I said, ‘Under no circumstances am I missing Pinchas Zukerman playing viola with the CSO.’ We drove, and there were trucks tipped over on the side of the highway; I would do anything to get there. Now, I’m quite close with members of the orchestra, and when I’m in town, I’ll hang out with a lot of them. I recently played a concert with the [violist] daughter of concertmaster Robert Chen. For me, it feels like coming home and playing with the people I know.”

A highlight of the Aug. 8 program will be a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola. Lipman’s 2014 recording of the piece with Rachel Barton Pine and the Academy of St. Martin the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner reached No. 3 on Billboard’s classical albums chart. “Mozart was a member of the Freemasons,” Lipman said. “Any time he wrote a piece in E-flat major, with three flats, it symbolized his fraternity, so by definition, this was a significant piece for him.”

“One of the things that drew me to the violin was the sound and how aesthetically beautiful I find it,” Chen said. “This piece is the perfect place for us to live in that kind of sound. Mozart is incredibly beautiful and incredibly complex, but it has to come off like it’s the most simple thing in the world, and that is something we both adore about the language.”

In anticipation of their joint performance, the two have been playing together since the vaccine rollout. They recently performed dual recitals, including a concert with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. “She has the ideal violin sound for me,” Lipman said. “When I think of what sound I want to emulate, I think of her. To play with Stella is really inspiring. She raises my level.”

He added with a laugh, “By the time we get to Ravinia, we should be pros.”

During the pandemic, when they couldn’t perform for live audiences, Chen and Lipman contributed to the online Violin Channel. In addition to performances, they each interviewed their mentors, including Perlman and violist Heidi Castleman.

“We did a lot of Zoom teaching,” Chen said. “There were a lot of recorded performances in empty halls and our living rooms, or interviews and discussions; anything we could to keep arts in people’s minds.”

Lipman took the opportunity for “a lot of self-reflection,” he said. “One of the realities of being a professional musician pre- and post-COVID is being on the road in different cities. Just because you’re onstage doesn’t mean you have time to reflect on the music. I spent a long time exploring my private relationship with music, which was incredible for the first several months. After that, it was like, ‘I’m ready to share it with an audience again.’ ”